


Thousand

by seamusdeanforever_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-04-25 00:41:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4940083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seamusdeanforever_archivist/pseuds/seamusdeanforever_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By Bec.</p><p>In which Seamus invents an anniversary, fails to prevent a fire hazard, and eats a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thousand

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Cora: this story was originally archived at [Seamus/Dean Forever](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Seamus/Dean_Forever), which I opened in 2002, and which was closed in 2005 when the server that hosted it was closed. To re-open the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in September 2015. An announcement was posted to OTW media channels, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact me using the e-mail address on the [Seamus/Dean Forever archive collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/seamusdeanforever/profile).
> 
> ***
> 
> DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" -- proverb.   
  
***  
"I've known you a thousand days now," Seamus says upon waking, sleepy enough to be sentimental, and smushes his nose into the pillow, smelling laundry detergent and sex and orange-vanilla candle wax, hearing Dean yawn, "More than nine years, don't be--" and then fall into a short silence, while he puzzles out the years and months. Seamus feels the soothing warmth of Dean's smile like a surprising afternoon shower just before falling asleep again.   
  
A thousand days exactly since they had been holed up in a wretched attic somewhere, all the doors locked from the outside, sure they were slated to die in the morning. Dean only got quieter as the hours went by and Seamus was so restless inside the dusty walls that he wanted to smash the circular window and jump the three stories; before the ground splintered his bones he'd get at least a lungful of fresh air.   
  
"I'm sorry, this is all my fault, I know--listen. I, uh. want you. I do. Sorry I didn't tell you earlier so--" said Dean, and Seamus stopped tapping on the floorboards, ribcage suddenly constricting and painful, and said hesitantly:   
  
"That's. good to hear." He shut his eyes, his tongue thick and unwieldy in his mouth, and wondered what melodramatic urge had led Dean to tell him this now, practically zero hour, instead of, say, any time in the last three years Seamus had been unmistakably head-over-heels about him.   
  
A few minutes later Dean said, "I guess I was--" and his voice cut off.   
  
Seamus wanted to scream "scared, you were scared, it won't kill you to say it once," but swallowed instead and muttered, "I'm scared now."   
  
Dean crawled over, the wooden floor creaking under his weight, and nudged Seamus's forehead with his own. "Hey..."   
  
"They're, we're stuck, they know where we are, they're gonna--"   
  
"Shut up, don't. C'mere." Dean slipped his hands around Seamus's waist, locked them behind his spine, and pressed his lips against Seamus's temple. Seamus gasped raggedly and draped himself over Dean, sliding his palms over the curves of his skull and mouthing all the dark dark bitter chocolate skin that he could reach, murmuring stupid things like "beautiful" and "always" and "god, your mouth", instead of "hey, thought you were straight" and "you have the worst timing in the world, d'you realize what's happening out there?" Dean didn't say anything, but his hands really, really made up for it.   
  
Seamus still wonders what would have happened if they had been in a different situation. One in which they didn't have enormous things to worry about, like the Unforgivable Curse to which they'd be subjected, and could instead worry about things like 'how will this affect our friendship?' and 'are we just doing this because there won't really be a morning after?'   
  
But here he is, stumbling down to breakfast, and there have been an awful lot of mornings after, because they were saved in the nick of time, whatever that meant, and the war is over and they aren't, they're still--something, something that they haven't talked about, because Dean simply doesn't talk about things like that, and Seamus is rather afraid to bring it up.   
  
Taking a deep breath of dusty air still turns him on, a little.   
  
He lolls against the kitchen counter and swallows too much coffee at once and his eyes water. Dean leans over and rubs his thumb under his eyelashes, says sweetly, "Remember, you promised to start looking for another job this week," and then Dean's tongue is good and forceful and nasty in his mouth, Dean's fingers slipping beneath the waistband of his sweatpants and pressing against the swell of bone and flesh just below the small of his back, for a moment. Before Dean straightens his tie and is out the door. It's Tuesday, so he must be going to his advertising job, the one that makes money and makes him forget about the things he sees in his other job, the cleaning-up-after-the-war junior mediwizard job.   
  
Worka-fuckin'-holic, Seamus thinks bitterly, and spoons creamy lemon yogurt out of the plastic container, letting it slide across his tongue and down his throat. He has to throw the rest away before he's more than half finished, because it has warmed to room temperature and is no longer chilly and refrigerated-delicious. He decides it's not too early for a non-alcoholic beer. He likes the taste.   
  
He wanders around the house, sipping the beer and rolling the cold, dripping bottle over his shirtless chest. Switches on the television and then feels vaguely guilty, because, after all, he's not contributing to the payment for the cable. Thinks about finding a job. It's not that he hasn't had jobs since the war, but he usually got fired after working in each restaurant for a couple of weeks for flirting too much. Seamus had once thought that was sort of the point of cute young waiters.   
  
The job listings are in last Thursday's paper, and it's out in the garage, waiting to be recycled. Seamus kneels in front of the pile, the musty smell making his nostrils flare, and leafs through the want ads, squinting because the only light is the thick line below the garage door. He gets distracted by the 'Variations' section of the personals, widening his eyes and mouthing the tiny-lettered, strict requirements and giggling immaturely.   
  
Something slimy seeps through the cloth at his knee, and he drops the newspaper and follows the trail of liquid. A canister of motor oil has fallen behind a box and is lying on its side, leaking its contents onto the concrete. If it's lost that much oil, it's probably all but dead, even a tourniquet won't save it now. Seamus sets it right-side-up anyway and wonders where a rag to clean up the mess might be located.   
  
Not in the box, but it's full of sketchbooks and folders and Seamus is easily distracted, hands fluttering nervously above the paper. Dean isn't usually picky about who sees his artwork, but this stuff is stored out in the garage like a shameful stash and damn the blue book on top looks intriguing, labeled '6th spring dormitory and studies'. Spring term, 6th year, just before everything went to hell and only some people came back.   
  
Seamus flips it open, the paper creamy and almost thick as cloth between his fingers. Lots of sketches of hands, feet, hard to draw, and other abstract shapes he assumes are artistic exercises. The most interesting pages are near the back, four in a row, mostly watercolors, each with the name of one of Dean's roommates scrawled along the side.   
  
'Harry': a weird room, the floor splintery wood, sad grey-brown, the walls mirrors set at angles from each other, catching light from unseen sources and reflecting indistinct figures, all bright colors and blurred faces. An outsized pair of glasses lies neglected on the floor, the frames heavy, black, crooked, a strip of white tape wrapped around the nosepiece. The picture is tinted, bathed in a barely-there, eerie shade of green.   
  
Ron is actually in his picture, exaggeratedly tall and thin with a dash of bright hair, standing on a swathe of yellowing grass. A dark, multi-personed shadow falls on him from above, obscuring the details of his profile.   
  
Neville. Well, Neville has Passed On, is No Longer With Us, is one of a long list of war casualties, unlikely heroes whose names will always be less famous than the names of those who survived and really won. Neville is dead, and Seamus cannot allow himself to look at his faults and fears and insecurities as depicted by the beautiful pretentious visual imagery of Seamus's fucking boyfriend. Or...whatever Dean thinks he is.   
  
Seamus grits his teeth and flips past Neville's picture, catching a glimpse of a hat and a frog and fuzzy pastel colors. His own is next, and it's not even finished, still a rough pencil sketch, abandoned halfway through. It's full of a mess of items, the way the foot of his bed always used to be at Hogwarts, a guitar pick and magazines and a burning candle and CD cases and a notebook opened to a page covered in large, exuberant handwriting. But that only fills about a fourth of the sheet and it looks like Dean either became bored with sketching his mundane personality or just couldn't figure him out, and Seamus doesn't know which possibility is worse.   
  
His knees ache, Seamus realizes. He prefers to savor that sensation at a time when he knows he'll be getting something out of it quite shortly, thank you very much, so he grabs the next collection of pictures in the box, a folder of loose-leaf papers, and returns to the bedroom, having forgotten about the oil spill.   
  
He settles himself back against the pillows. These drawings are more recent, all within the last two years. Seamus is drawn to one, painted with oils, he thinks, with six arms entwined, all bent elbows and grasping fingers and sweat-gleaming skin. He starts to laugh -- the darkest pair are Dean's, the tan, golden-haired pair are his, so the fawn-freckled arms must belong to that skinny guy they picked up at a club once and still have lunch with occasionally. Aaron. yeah. That was only a few months ago, and Seamus remembers extraneous body heat and the surprising confusion he felt when hands that didn't belong to Dean touched his thighs, his cock, and the cute little whimper Aaron made when he came. Funny as hell. And later, nervously asking Dean what he had thought. It had been Seamus's idea, of course, and a first, and Dean had wrinkled his nose and grinned and said "lots of arms." Which, Seamus finds, is the note penciled on the back of the picture.   
  
The next seems commonplace, a scene of the Frog, a gay mixed dance club they frequent. Seamus has heard that it's called the Frog because sometimes, after giving a blowjob, you sound like you have a frog in your throat, but he's not sure if he believes that. All the paint colors are dark or neon; all the dancing people are wearing lovely little nothings and grinding against each other and having a grand old time. The picture pulses with life and an electronica beat, and Seamus runs his fingers across the surface, half-expecting to feel real vinyl and silk and hair stiff with gel and dye, even though Dean rarely enchants his artwork. He feels only dry paint and then, halfway down the page, an interruption in the smoothness. It's a pull-out flap, outlining, from shoulders to knees, a blonde dancer in profile, hips swiveling back, finger-splayed hands sliding down his shiny dark pants. Seamus pulls the flap away and laughs breathily, uncomfortably.   
  
Way to go for the shock value, Dean, he thinks. It's like a tiny X-ray panel or a creepy architectural crossview, the dancer exposed, a sliver of leather pants, a round layer of flesh, and then, in painstaking physical detail, an erect, disembodied penis drawn fucking the dancer.   
  
Well. It makes sense. Those dance moves were designed to imitate sex. But. but that dancer is short, and blond, and his face is turned away, and Seamus dances like that sometimes, like his hands are someone else's and he is twisting down on the cock that fucks him. Perhaps the drawing is pure observation, but what if it is supposed to be a commentary? The thought makes his stomach wriggle anxiously, makes him imagine having to ask, "Dean, like, do you think I'm an exhibitionist slut?"   
  
He flips the picture over quickly. He's under no obligation to look at it. He probably oughtn't, anyway.   
  
The next is no better for his equilibrium. It's on a scrap of paper, with the caption "oh. war." Seamus recognizes the inked sketch immediately -- a little girl, a child, dead in her terribly ordinary summer shorts and tank top, face and hands swollen with blood. Dean was the one who found her, in the back of a "safe" house, separated from her family. Just another casualty, really. Nothing unusual.   
  
Seamus hadn't known that she had affected Dean so. He has never said anything, but the ink lines of the drawing are quavery, as though he'd been shivering when he drew it. People are still cautious around Seamus; they talk in low tones about neutral topics and seem surprised that he still jokes and laughs and flirts. Yes, they both had horrible times in the war, and Seamus is the one who's more visibly upset by it, but maybe they've been wrong all along, and it's Dean who has the jagged leaking tear somewhere hidden deep inside himself.   
  
It's no use guilt-tripping himself, but Seamus does, anyway. It's no use. Either Dean will talk to him about important stuff or he won't and so far, in his experience, the nays have it.   
  
This was a bad, bad idea, looking at these things.   
  
There's one picture left in the folder, and Seamus decides he might as well take a peek. If it induces full emotional nausea, well. He knows who to blame.   
  
But it's beautiful, stunning, all the glowing words he can think of and then he stops thinking and just looks, blank and absorbing. It's. it's both of them, must be lying on some blanket, having se--no , making love, a phrase Seamus makes fun of, but that's it, if anything is, because through some trick of his brush, Dean has caused their bodies to seem to melt into one another, skin tones blending into mocha at the edges, hands clasped and fingers interwoven. In some places, in the shadows, it's not discernible where one ends and the other begins. Seamus's face is half-hidden, his mouth clinging to Dean's, but Dean's face is everything Seamus means when he says the word "love", the fondly half-lidded eyes, the slack, abandoned expression you only allow yourself to wear in front of someone you trust implicitly, the mouth that, despite its previous commitment to kissing Seamus, still wants to smile.   
  
Seamus shuts his eyes. When he opens them again, the picture is still there, and his nose prickles like he's going to sneeze or, or cry, and he swallows convulsively and his mouth curves in a tentative smile.   
  
He stacks the pictures back in the folder and rests it on the bedspread, hands surprisingly steady, and takes a shower and gets back into his sweatpants and eats a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream and falls asleep in the middle of an old Stephen King book.   
  
"Hey, Seamus--you lazybones."   
  
Seamus stirs, squints his eyes open. "mm. oh. Hey! Good, good afternoon, right?" Dean's barely inside the bedroom, hand still on the doorknob, smirking. "How was work? Where did you put the burnt-out matches? Did you throw them away or put them in a glass of water or what? Because this entire room smells like sulphur and I've never known, is that spelled with an f or a p-h?" He lays a protective hand across the folder. He'd meant to -- well, not fall asleep in the first place, certainly, but at least wake up and conceal the incriminating evidence.   
  
"Seamus, did you--"   
  
"--yes, I drank the orange juice straight from the container, how could you tell? But only because every single glass is dirty and they're just piling up by the sink whimpering 'wash me! Wash me, Dean!', see, after all, it was your turn last night, but no, you shirked your domestic duty in order to fuck me and while I admit, yes, I'd do me too, were that anatomically possible, 'cause I'm quite a tempting morsel -- er, not that you ought to eat me or anything, that would be a little too painful and Jeffrey Dahmer-esque -- but anyway , the quite natural desire on your part to get up close and personal with my hot body is not a valid excuse for neglecting to do the dishes."   
  
"Stop trying to distract me, Seamus, it's okay; you're allowed to look at my sketchbooks."   
  
"I'm not trying to distract you, of course not, it never works, you have a one track mind, I. I...uh. About those pictures. I--will you marry me?"   
  
Dean quirks an eyebrow.   
  
"I mean. or whatever. You want to go out with me?"   
  
"Where do you want to go?"   
  
"Are you being deliberately obtuse?"   
  
Dean laughs, says "yes," and kisses him hard, the combination of which answers everything. 


End file.
